Packaged Services

Alcatel is the world's leading supplier of submarine networks for voice, data and Internet communication, seamlessly linking people, businesses, countries and continents under the oceans that cover 70% of the Earth's surface.

Around 40% of the world's undersea transmission systems are manufactured by Alcatel at its plant at Greenwich in London.

It is a complex, data-intensive global enterprise requiring instant access to a swelling store of information -and that's where the SAP Data Archiving Packaged Service came to the rescue.

"While we were not suffering performance problems, it was clear that the rate of growth of our database - around two Gigabytes a month - would present us with problems within a year," says Peter Whitehead, SAP Project Manager at Alcatel's submarine networks business.

The SAP Data Archiving Packaged Service encompassed software combined with the resources for installation, commissioning and documentation for a single module of their choice. "The concept was that minimal effort is required by the user, but at the end of the project the user is self-sufficient," says Peter Whitehead. "It was claimed that the whole process could be completed in less than a month - and it was also offered at a fixed price that was less than we had estimated to handle the task in-house."

The solution was implemented by a team of four, comprising staff from SAP, Proceed and Easy Software, and proved to be on object lesson in speed and efficiency. "To say that the project has met our expectations would be an understatement, "says Peter Whitehead. "Installation of the hardware was performed by our staff overnight and 48 hours later we had a fully commissioned and documented Production Order archive from the development system. This included the creation of the archiving info structure, which allows us to access our most frequently reported data without recourse to the actual archive."

"This has been our first experience of using an SAP Packaged Service, but if this experience is anything to go by, it won't be the last, "says Peter. "As opportunities present themselves to use an 'all-in-one' offering, which releases our own resource for other duties, we will certainly take advantage of them. SAP Packaged Services are redefining the meaning of rapid deployment and customer value."

Peter Whitehead

SAP Project Manager